


Til-Bugs

by talefeathers



Category: Romeo And Juliet - All Media Types, Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Drabble, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lucid Dreaming, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:28:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23683918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talefeathers/pseuds/talefeathers
Summary: Valentine is in his childhood backyard in the dead of night, and Mercutio has something horrible to show him.
Relationships: Mercutio & Valentine
Kudos: 7
Collections: Romeo & Juliet, Tumblr Drabbles





	Til-Bugs

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Things you said in the backyard at night."

Valentine has always been a lucid dreamer, and tonight is no exception; he knows he is dreaming almost as soon as he realizes where he is. He only has the fuzziest memories of this backyard, behind the house he spent his first five years in. His parents’ house.

It’s dark outside, and his brother is there, a subconscious amalgam of Mercutio at every age he ever was. He’s seventeen as much as he’s thirteen, as much as he’s nine. He calls Valentine over and he shows him a writhing mass of unsettling, shape-stuttering bugs in the dirt. Valentine knows they are angry, can see it in the urgent way they move, but Mercutio seems blissfully unaware of this. The bugs vibrate and they try to grab onto Valentine’s fingers with their twitching, glitching legs.

“Stop it,” Valentine says. “Stop it, put them back.”

“They weird, or what?” Mercutio asks, too calm by far.

“What are they?” Valentine asks. “I don’t like them, Cue.”

“They’re til-bugs,” Mercutio says. “Like ‘until.’ They know the future.”

“I really don’t like them,” Valentine says again, and he can feel himself beginning to hyperventilate. He knows he is dreaming, and he knows that, in this dream’s future, Mercutio is dead. “Put them back, Cue, please, don’t let them—” He isn’t sure what he doesn’t want them to do; isn’t sure what they do at all, with that terrible knowledge of theirs. “Don’t let them get me,” he whispers. “Don’t let them show me.”

Mercutio, to his credit, does try to put them back, but the til-bugs are even more agitated now. Valentine knows somehow that it’s already too late; that whatever Mercutio set in motion by unearthing these things can’t be stopped anymore. Mercutio lurches toward the ground as one of them catches his hand and yanks it.

_ Wake up, _ Valentine begs himself, unable to tear his eyes away from the horrible scene unfolding before him, Mercutio being dragged into the dirt by these monstrous, form-flickering bugs, his brows knit together in a look of vaguely hurt confusion.  _ Wake up. Wake up. Wake— _

Valentine jolts into the darkness of his bedroom, shaking the phantom legs of the til-bugs from his arms and legs. He sits up and wraps his arms around his legs, buries his face against his knees. Tries to breathe away the adrenaline that shudders through his frame.

“What the fuck,” he gasps. He wraps his arms around his head, gives himself a squeeze. “Jesus, what the fuck.”


End file.
